Mark Twain enunciated what conservatives have come to call the Anthony Fauci Principle: Given an opportunity to tell the truth, government officials and the mainstream media rarely do.

There are 3 kinds of lies, Twain wrote: Lies, damn lies and statistics.

A lie often better serves the media, Big Tech and political narratives.

They are only following the cynical advice of Italian political strategist Niccoli Machiavelli: The wise ruler rarely tells the truth if something else will serve his purpose.

This goes back to Biblical times and Pontius Pilate. Given the choice between a righteous man and a convicted criminal, gullible people will often choose the latter. Or as they say in politics, he may be a ly

Or as they say in politics, he may be a lying SOB but he’s “our” lying SOB.

GOOD EXAMPLES of this are the way the media handled the Hunter Biden scandal and the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill siege and the socalled FBI investigation.

Big Tech and the media ignored, even suppressed, the Hunter Biden billion dollar foreign payoffs and the discovery of his laptop which gave his game away.

They called the nasty Capitol Hill business an armed insurrection although the only arms seem to have been in police hands.

The FBI even seems to be in on this.

The agency’s boss, Christopher Wray, rejected US senators’ questions, saying his agency doesn’t know or won’t tell how Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died or even if a homicide is suspected, Holman Jenkins wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Officer Sicknick is the only policeman killed in the melee. The New York Times reported and later retracted a story that he was hit on the head with a fire extinguisher.

The medical examiner’s autopsy results remain hidden from the public but presumably not from the FBI.

THE CAUSES of Officer Sicknick’s death should be made public because elected officials repeated the fire-extinguisher claim in the Donald Trump impeachment trial.

The FBI chief’s refusal to comment was the newsiest part of his testimony and yet his remarks went widely unreported.

“The spin you get with the news is one thing, a whiff of news being ignored is something else,” Jenkins wrote.

“It’s one thing to bury the facts but another not even to want to find them.

“An ominous development would be if any politically sensitive death investigation in the nation’s capital now is liable to be manipulated for political reasons.”

NEWSPAPERS WERE once flush with cash.

Big Tech and the internet changed that.

At the Washington Post — now owed by Big Tech impresario Jeff Bezos of Amazon – editors were comfortable if their investigative reporters had bylines in the paper once a year. The flush newspapers of the past were good for something. That something was uncovering secrets and refusing to let intriguing questions go unanswered.

These stories may be the ultimate case of news being actively suppressed.

Next: Laugh it off